Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  But the play of pictures in his mind kept going back to the taxi ride in from the airport. Woods. Small fields. Groups of men and women working in what he took to be allotments of some kind. A tethered donkey eating the roadside grass. In a vegetable garden, a woman working with a mattock.

  Then a narrow stone humpback bridge, the road rising, and he’d been looking down over the side of the bridge into a meadow. And there he’d caught a flash of an enormous white bird standing.

  He’d cried out to the driver to stop and back up. He’d pointed. The driver, rolling down his window and lighting a cigarette, said, “You like such?”

  He’d sat staring.

  “What is it? What’s it called?”

  The driver said something, perhaps a name.

  Mist hung over the stream. He could not see the water. The stream’s course was plotted by polled willows. The bird was taller than the three grey stacked bales of last year’s hay.

  He guessed it stood nearly four feet high.

  “Cranes,’ Christopher had said on the bus from Ljubljana.

  “I’ve somehow never really warmed to birds.”

  “Not storks?”

  “No, these are rather famous. They’ll have been here for about two weeks now. They spend the winters in North Africa. Morocco, somewhere like that.”

  “And they nest here? In Slovenia ?”

  “And always in the same place. They just pile new stuff on top of the old.”

  “You mean the same birds go back to the same nest?”

  “They mate for life, apparently. Some pairs have been together for fifty years.”

  He pulled a face.

  “Not really my cup of tea.”

  As he slipped towards sleep, just conscious of the irregular dripping sounds from his shirt in the bathroom, he imagined himself in the meadow trying to get closer to the crane without frightening it. The bird was aware of him and walked away keeping the distance between them constant. It walked slowly and gracefully, sometimes hesitating before setting down a foot, reminding him of the way herons stalk. He could see it quite clearly. Its body was white except for the bustle of tail feathers about its rump, which were grey shading to black. Its long neck was black with a white patch around the eyes and, on top of its head, a cap of brilliant red. He edged closer. The crane was pacing along the margin of the mist, from time to time stopping and turning its head to the side as if listening. Past the old bales of hay and the field becoming squelchy, breaking down into tussocks and clumps. And as he looks up again from the unsure footing, the crane is stepping into the mist, which accepts it and wreathes around it, hiding it from view.

  Three waiters in mauve jackets and mauve bow ties stood beside the buffet tables impassively surveying the breakfasters. Their function seemed to be to keep the tables stocked and tidy. From time to time they flapped their napkins at crumbs. Two of them had luxuriant drooping mustachios, growths he thought of as Serbian.

  He inspected the array of dishes. Cornflakes, muesli, pickled mushrooms, sliced ham, salami, liverwurst, hardboiled eggs, smoked fish, triangles of processed Swiss cheese in silver foil, a soft white cheese in liquid—either feta or brinza—and small round cheeses covered in yellow wax, which he suspected might be kashkaval—honey, rolls, butter. Juice in jugs. Milk. Coffee in thermos flasks.

  No sign of Christopher, so he took his tray to an uncrowded table and nodded to a darkly Arab-looking man who promptly passed him a card, which read: Abdul-Rahman Majeed Al-Mansoor. Baghdad. Iraq.

  “Hello,” said Abdul-Rahman. “How are you? I am fine.”

  As Forde started to crack and peel shell from his egg, the other man at the table took out his wallet and extracted a card, saying, “I hope that my coughing will not discommode you. I cannot suppress it as the cough is hysterical in origin. My card. Dorscht. Vienna. Canadianist.”

  Pretending abstraction, Forde busied himself with his breakfast. Covertly he watched Dorscht. Dorscht had a black plastic thermos jug from which he was pouring . . . hot water. He was wearing a leather purse or pouch on a strap that crossed his chest. The archaic word “scrip’ flashed into Forde’s mind. From his purse Dorscht took a cracker, a Ryvita-looking thing, and started nibbling.

  The hubbub in the room was rising to a constant roar. Three men and two women brought trays to the table. They seemed to be a mixture of Canadians and Americans and all seemed to know each other. They were arguing about a poet.

  “. . . but surely he’s noted for his deconstruction of binaries.”

  “. . . and by the introduction of chorus avoids the monological egocentricity of conventional lyric discourse.”

  Christ!

  “Let me say,” brayed one of the men, “let me say, in full awareness of heteroglossia . . .”

  Christ!

  Dorscht performed his chugging cough.

  Abdul-Rahman Majeed Al-Mansoor belched and patted prissily at his lips with a paper napkin.

  Dorscht had a little silver box now, which he evidently kept with his crackers. He was selecting from it three kinds of pills. One of them looked like Valium.

  Suddenly Forde sensed someone close to him, was aware someone was staring at him. He turned his head and looked up.

  Her arm was raised as though she’d been about to touch his shoulder.

  “It is . . . isn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  He got to his feet.

  “I’m so happy,” she said.

  “Karla,” he said.

  At the narrow end of the lake the water was shallow and choked with weed. The air was rank with the smell of mud and rotting vegetation. Karla stopped and pointed down into the water.

  “What is the name of this in English?”

  Floating there just a foot from the edge of the lake was a mass of frog spawn. He knelt on one knee and worked his hands under the jelly, raising it slightly. It was the size of a soccer ball. He was amazed at the weight of the mass, amazed and then suddenly not amazed, pierced by memory, transported back to his ten-year-old self. He saw himself crouching beside a pool in an abandoned gravel pit, which was posted with signs saying DANGER. NO TRESPASSING . On the ground beside him stood his big Ovaltine jar with air holes punched through the lid. It was full of frog spawn. He was catching palmated newts with a small net made of clumsily stitched lace curtain and placing them in his weed-filled tin. All about him yellow coltsfoot flowers.

  “In German,’ she said, “you say Froschlaich.”

  Some of the intensely black dots were already starting to elongate into commas. As she bent to look, her hair touched his cheek. The mass of jelly poured out of his hands and slipped back into the water, sinking and then rising again to ride just beneath the surface.

  Forde felt almost giddy. His hands were tingling from the coldness of the water. He felt obscurely excited by the memory the feel of the frog spawn had prompted. He felt he could not breathe in deeply enough. The sun was hot on his back. After months of grinding winter it was a joy not to be wearing boots, a joy not to be wearing a parka, a joy to see the lime-green leaves, the froth of foliage, to hear birdsong, sunlight hinting and glinting on the water, dandelions glowing, growing from crevices in the rock face the delicate fronds of hart’s-tongue ferns.

  He wanted to hold this place and moment in his mind forever.

  Ahead of them a cafe bright with umbrellas. They sat at a patio table and drank cappuccinos, the lake’s soft swell lapping at the patio’s wooden pilings. Everything conspired to please, the sun, the water sounds, the stiffness of the foam on his coffee, the crisp paper wrapping on the sugar cubes. He watched her hands, the glint of transparent varnish on her fingernails.

  Into a sudden silence, Forde said, “And . . . ah . . . Viktor?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “I suppose Viktor’s with your husband.”
/>   “Oh, no,” she said. “He’s staying with a friend of mine from the university. He likes it there. She spoils him and she has a hound he can play with.”

  “Hmmm,” said Forde.

  “And he knows that when I return I will be bringing presents.”

  Forde nodded.

  They walked on to finish the circuit of the lake. As they neared the hotel, Karla said, “Tell me about your name. I’ve often wondered about this. In English, people who are Robert are called Bob. So are you called Bob or Robert?”

  “Well, sometimes Rob but the people closest to me seem to call me Forde.”

  She paused in the doorway.

  “Then I, too,” she declared, “will address you as Forde.”

  He sketched a comic caricature of a Germanic bow.

  “My colleagues will be wondering where I am,” she said. “I must go and hear a paper.”

  “We’ll meet for dinner?”

  She smiled and nodded.

  “But I must change my shoes.”

  She put her hand on his arm and then turned and walked off across the hotel lobby.

  He looked into the dining room in hopes of finding Christopher but the buffet tables had been stacked away and a lone waiter was droning away with a vacuum cleaner.

  Papers were being delivered in all the conference rooms. He eased open doors.

  “. . . his fiction is sociolect and foregrounds the process of enunciation.”

  Christ!

  “. . . the analytico-referential discourse reinstalls itself covering up a self-referential critique which . . .”

  Christ!

  In the small bar just off the lobby he settled himself with a bottle of Becks and, writing on the blank pages of an abandoned conference programme, started to make notes. The feel of the frog spawn had unsettled him. He was startled by the intensity of the images and the spate of words he was dashing onto the pages. He had no idea what he might use it for, but he certainly wasn’t going to question the gift.

  Around the top of the old gravel pit, bramble bushes grew in profusion. In late August and early September they were heavy with blackberries. He used the curved handle of a walking stick to draw the laden shoots towards him. He always took the blackberries to his grandmother, who made blackberry and apple pies and blackberry vinegar to pour on pancakes.

  His maternal grandparents lived in a tiny, jerry-built, company-owned row house not many miles from the pit where his grandfather had worked all his life. The backs of the houses looked onto a squalid cobbled square where vivid algae slimed the open drains. In the centre of the square stood a row of outhouses and a communal stand pipe. Surrounding the square were tumbledown sheds in which were kept gardening tools, work benches, rabbits, old bicycles, junk. And towering above the houses and the yard up on the hillside stood an abandoned factory.

  The factory was a classic Victorian building of iron and glass. Had someone told him once it had been a shoe factory? Every time he had gone out of the back door, there it was, derelict, looming dark over the yard. Many of the glass panels were shattered or gaped blank. The road that ran up to the front of it was disused and closed off by an iron gate hung with threatening notices. Brambles and nettles grew right up to the walls. The building both lured and frightened him. It was a place of mystery. His mother and his grandparents had told him constantly of its danger.

  “You go there,” his grandfather cackled, “and the tramps’ll get you.”

  Falling glass. Rotting boards. Trespass.

  The pencil racing.

  He bore in on it.

  (Why machinery not melted down in 1939 for munitions?)

  Inside—very quiet, still. The floor loud with glass. The light is dim—gloomy—subaqueous. Yes. Factory like sunken ship. Silt and weed have blunted its shape. The machinery is actually changing shape. What was once precise geometry—straight lines of steel—is now blurring, becoming rounded by rust and decay. Furred. Dali. Pigeon shit growing like guano. Whitewash on walls leprous and swollen. Brutality of the shapes and spaces oppressive. Girders, I-beams—name of place Nazis hanged Bomb Plot people with piano wire? Check. Spaces have that kind of feel.

  What is going to happen here?

  “There’s Karla on the left,” Forde said to Christopher.

  They watched the three women coming across the lobby.

  “Which do you think’s the heavy?” said Christopher.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The minder.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, really, Robert,” said Christopher. “Don’t be impossibly naive. Stasi informers monitor the political dependability of colleagues. Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, they call them. And one of them’s bound to be one.”

  The other two women went on into the dining room.

  “Karla,” said Forde, “may I introduce you to Christopher Harris. Karla Schiff.”

  “Enchanted,” said Christopher in a flat tone.

  But the menu cheered him up. It was written in Slovene and English. It offered: Ham Dumplings with Fried Potatoes, Veal Ribs with Fried Potatoes, and Butter Pies with Chicken Pluck.

  “That is rather good, isn’t it?” said Christopher. “The Slovene would suggest they mean what Americans call ‘chicken pot pie.’”

  The din was extraordinary and, as wine bottles appeared, was getting louder. Waiters and waitresses were carrying plates on the largest trays Forde had ever seen. They must have been four feet across. The waitresses were wearing what he thought of as Roman-legionnaire sandals, straps wound up round the ankles and shin. Karla’s shoes were made of plaited brown leather and were narrow and elegant and seemed to him very expensive-looking. He still felt slightly dissociated, still a little dazed by that world of memory and imagination, and was content to watch Karla and let rain down upon him the sparks and boom and brilliance of Christopher’s performance.

  Slovene wine production understandably collective rather than Mis en Bouteilles au Château so the height of praise would perhaps be the word serviceable. . . .

  Forde smiled and sipped.

  Karla was wearing a loose, white muslin blouse whose changing configurations kept his eye returning.

  He wondered where Dorscht was seated; he sensed that Dorscht had immense possibilities.

  He suddenly noticed that Christopher had tended to his nose with pancake make-up.

  Frescos again. Mid-fourteenth century. The death of John the Baptist. A tiny, perfect chapel near Bohinj. The headless corpse gouting blood in three streams. Angels decorated the other walls. One angel had a triple goitre.

  “If only Bernard Berenson had visited Slovenia,” Christopher said, “our frescos would be famous throughout the world.”

  “The Master of Bohinj,” said Forde.

  “The Master of the Goitre,” said Christopher.

  “Master of the Goitred Angel,” said Forde.

  “Amico,” said Christopher, “of the Master of the Goitred Angel.”

  Forde laughed delightedly.

  “It isn’t kind, Forde,” said Karla, “it isn’t being nice to talk at dinner about things I don’t understand.”

  Her lips moved into the faintest suggestion of a pout and Forde was enchanted.

  As he sluiced his shirt in the washbasin, he burped and the taste of tarragon cake revisited him. They had gone to the bar off the lobby after dinner and had drunk something Christopher claimed was a local specialty, a pear brandy, but it hadn’t tasted of pears and was aggressively nasty, like grappa or marc, and the bar had been cramped and jammed with people talking about the materiality of the signifier.

  Forde was beginning to feel rather peculiar. He felt hot and somehow bloated though he had not eaten much of the ham dumplings. The fluorescent lights in the bathroom were unusually harsh and turned the white tiles, chrome, and red rubber mat in
to a restraining room in a hospital for the criminally insane. He studied his face in the mirror. When he swallowed, his throat seemed constricted. He wondered if he was getting a cold.

  He decided that he might ward it off by taking vitamin C and an extra aspirin. He took an aspirin every day to thin his blood. The heart attack that was going to fell him was never far from his conscious thought. He decided that if he took vitamin C with a Scotch from the mini-bar and added to the Scotch a little warm water, this would render the Scotch medicinal, but the drink burned and it felt as if he were pouring alcohol onto raw flesh. He had difficulty swallowing the pills.

  He went back into the bathroom and took off his underpants to wash them.

  He thought how very silly men looked naked but for socks. Pain was clutching his stomach. He sat on the toilet in the mad light, emitting high-pitched, keening farts, which culminated in an explosive discharge. He stood and looked in the toilet and then bent and peered. Finally, he knelt to look. Floating on the surface were three whitish things, each ringed with what looked like froth. They looked exactly like the water-steeped jasmine flowers in Chinese tea.

  Florets, he thought.

  An efflorescence in his bowels.

  Benign?

  Or cancerous?

  Despite the aspirin, he still felt hot, feverish. He switched on the bedside lamp. He lay naked on top of the coverlet. The grey velvet on the walls was dappled with faded spots, which showed in this light like the subtle rosettes on a black leopard’s flanks.

  He switched the light off and lay in the dark, feeling ill and swallowing with difficulty. His head was aching. The room felt close about him, furry. He seemed to sense the grey walls almost imperceptibly moving as if they were breathing. He slept fitfully, dozing, waking with a start, drifting off deeper to lose himself in a chaotic and terrifying dream, the narrow beam of his flashlight cutting into the darkness, a trussed body hanging from a steel beam, the broken glass loud under his feet.